File photo of students walking on the campus of Seton Hall University. Students from Seton Hall and Princeton University were among those who made this year's Inc. magazine "America's Coolest College Startups" list.
(John Munson/The Star-Ledger)

The ranking includes FiscalNote, a company that mines government data looking for trends. It was started by Princeton University student Timothy Hwang along with students from the University of Maryland and Emory University.

"FiscalNote's mission is to unlock government data and make it useful. Whether it is legislation, regulations, or court cases, all this information is in the form of unstructured data and we aim to clean it up," the students said in their pitch.

The company uses computer algorithms to analyze government data from all 50 states and Congress. The founders claim they can predict with 90 percent accuracy whether a proposed Congressional bill will be passed into law. FiscalNote has already secured $1.2 million in seed money from investors, Inc. magazine reported.

Seton Hall University senior Taseen Peterson also made the list. Peterson, a Newark native, and two partners developed Notefuly, an app that helps users share the digital version of sticky notes on cell phones, tablets and computers.